Derby; Saturday, 22 July, 2023

Of course, what I’d forgotten to take into account was with the power off my phone was no longer charging, and around 7am it decided to join in on the noise party by making it’s plaintive I’m starving beeps which woke me up and led me to heading back to reception to try and get the power sorted. One of the reception team spent a good 20 minutes trying to get the power back on in my room – not least of all so that I could have a shower as the bathroom was entirely internal with no light source.

After 20 minutes to unplugging everything in the room and trying to reset the circuits she gave up and went to see if there was a different room they could move me to – at which point they found out it wasn’t just my room but a whole bank of rooms that had the power blown on them, so in the end they had to move me across the corridor to a worse room for the rest of the stay – but at least it had working power so that I could have a shower in light and get some juice back into my phone.

Feeling slightly more human with a shower, albeit feeling the effects of having a really poor nights sleep, I headed down to breakfast and fuelled myself up for the day before heading back to the room, grabbing my day bag and heading out to do some tourist things.

First stop of the morning was the Cathedral and I spent quite a bit longer exploring it that I was expecting to – not least of all as the Church itself was only promoted to Cathedral in the 1920s, so wasn’t constructed as a great Cathedral building. However, it’s got as rich a history as many other cathedrals, not least of all for being the burial place of Bess of Hardwick – at one point the richest women in England, matriarch of the Cavendish dynasty, friend of Elizabeth I and responsible for a number of the best stately homes in the UK including Chatsworth, Hardwick and Bolsover.

From the cathedral I wandered the short distance round to the house that Georgian architect Joseph Pickford built for himself. Whilst he’s not as well know as some of his contemporaries the building is still a very fine house and is now a museum that shows both how the family would have lived when the first moved in there, as well as other examples of his work and in the top floors a museum dedicated to miniature theatres – a bit of a weird mix, but worth a few minutes looking round.

From the Pickford house I headed down to the riverside where I was booked on a cruise aboard a solar powered narrowboat – thankfully, given the distinct lack of sun for the previous couple of weeks, the boat can also charge it’s batteries by using a shore connection, so we were able to enjoy a 45 minute journey up and back on a small section of the Derwent between two weirs.

The boat starts and ends on the opposite bank of the river to the Museum of Making and that was my next stop, heading inside to have a look at the history of manufacturing in the city and more widely. The museum has a number of different exhibits, including an entire floor that is more museum store than exhibit – but lets you see a large part of the collection. The museum traces manufacturing from the first Factories – arguably on the same site as the current museum – through to modern manufacturing with Derby being home to Planes, Trains and Automobiles with Rolls Royce Engines, Alstom Trains and Toyota still present in the city.

A short walk away from the Museum of Making and I found myself at the City’s main Museum and Art Gallery. The museum has an eclectic range of exhibits from pre-historic flints and hippos to the modern day via a Broze Age Longboat and a small collection of stuffed animals. The Art Gallery houses a number of works by Derby born artist Joseph Wright.

By now it was already late into the afternoon and I realised that I still hadn’t had any lunch so I quickly grabbed one of the last sandwiches left in a Greggs near my hotel and headed back to my room to have lunch in there.

Being located directly above the bus station it also meant that I could plan what to do with the rest of the afternoon and early evening, which meant heading down to the bus station and catching a bus up the river valley to the town of Belper, part of the Derwent Valley Mills world heritage site. I spent about 45 minutes wandering around Belper in increasingly wet conditions before I decided to just give up, head back to the bus station and catch the bus back into Derby via a supermarket to grab some food and go back to my hotel room to eat, dry off and try and get a better nights sleep.